The University of Nevada, Reno, invites scholarly and creative submissions for the sixth annual College of Liberal Arts Graduate Symposium (CLAGS). CLAGS is an interdisciplinary graduate conference designed to increase dialogue and knowledge across, but not limited to, the liberal arts and between institutions, offering participants an opportunity to broaden academic research and develop professional relationships.

Even as late as post-modernity, we find authors who speak of the human’s purported supremacy over those with whom it shares the earth. As the story goes, the human alone reigns supreme in the universe. Today, we find this hubris difficult to sustain. In the academy, the paradigmatic shifts in emphasis (from hierarchy of power to democracy of network, inhuman struggle to nonhuman animal, edified architecture to ordinary object, etc.), reflect this re-valuation. Despite the human’s alleged subordination to–or dissolution in–the digital or the cyborg, we are inclined to wonder: has the category “human” endured despite, or even because of, its “post-human” fate? Or has the “human” been forever washed away like an etching drawn on the seashore, as Michel Foucault predicts? In either case, how are we to understand and cope with the inhuman atrocities that take place on a daily basis around the globe?

This year’s symposium addresses the ways in which the afterlives of humanism (inhuman, post-human, non-human, etc.) variously work to support, complicate, and undermine our understanding of the human: its definition, epistemic function, and ontological underpinning.

We seek submissions that consider, or reconsider, humanity, inhumanity, or the humanities, across a variety of fields including, but not limited to:

Humanist Landscapes

Global capitalism

Contemporary/urgent crises

Deconstructing the anthropocene

Mythical and human history

Violence

Public Viewership

Memory, performance, storytelling

Abstractions vs. lived experience

Voyeurism, gaze, objectification

Inscription, re-inscription, description

Embodiment

Posthuman and/or New Materialist bodies

Non-human and/or geographical bodies

(De)colonized bodies

Theorized, rhetoricized, or historicized bodies

Textual “bodies”

Political bodies

Individual presentations and panel proposals should include name, submission title, and institutional affiliation. If applicable, also include which of the above pre-organized clusters you see yourself fitting into. Proposals should be no more than 150 words; panel proposals should include an abstract and title for the entire panel, along with individual descriptions of the constitutive presentations. All submissions are due via email to clags2016@gmail.com by December 1, 2015.